The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; she to whom every soil is as her native one is already strong; but she is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place,” so Hugh of St. Victor wrote over six hundred years ago . . . In Blood Orange, these words find a rich and vitally new embodiment for our own time . . . At once vividly present in the moment and fully attuned to the under-dwelling currents of history, . . .Torres’ poems affirm and achieve a hard-won continuity of feeling and insight. [These] poems move with the fluid assurance of a dancer, and sing with enviable lyric grace. ~Daniel Tobin, author of From Nothing, The Net, and Belated Heavens

Because paying attention is a form of prayer, Angela Narciso Torres’s poems pay deep and close attention. The details of these poems are stitched together with great care, and what we get is not just the landscape of memory but also the landscape of family, which in the end is the god we really pray to when we are restless. These are beautiful and beautifully made poems. ~C. Dale Young, author of The Halo, Torn, and The Second Person.

There's something lush and holy in these poems that slip between generations, between daughterhood and motherhood. Blood Orange elegantly charts the mysteries of family and place, time and its uncertainties, with a keen vision that is at once sensual, entrancing and deeply felt. Line by careful line, Angela Narciso Torres brings forward an enchanting poetry, with "two fingers on the pulse like the true point / of a divining rod," always ready to lead us to water or love—the currents that shimmer beneath this book's rich surfaces. ~Matthew Olzmann, author of Contradictions in the Design and Mezzanines

What Angela Narciso Torres seeks, and what she gives us again and again in these fine poems—when she sees a branch bent by the weight of blood oranges the children have already picked and eaten, when she remembers the warm scent of night jasmine drifting into the window from the porch, when she describes her father’s care with the remnant of a bar of soap gone thin during the days of her mother’s absence--what she finds, beyond the tropical landscape of her childhood, is the amazing vividness of a world that flourishes in the moment of its vanishing.~Brooks Haxton, author of They Lift Their WIngs to Cry